Page 1634 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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device of the Chief Minister in this regard is to act as if any cuts to taxes would have to come from front-line staff such as doctors, nurses or police. However, this is clearly not the case as the budget provides a great deal of wasteful expenditure. In fact, as I will discuss shortly, staffing increases have been most prominent not in front-line services but in the Chief Minister’s own department.
In the 2008-09 financial year, the government’s total taxation is budgeted to increase to a massive $1.049 billion. This represents an increase in expenditure of 66.2 per cent since the government came to power in late 2001. This is an average increase of 7.53 per cent per annum. This is a quite extraordinary increase over a period of two terms of government and it certainly blows any figures for economic growth out of the water. The result is an increase in the size of government relative to the economy as a whole, and the result is a government that swallows up more and more of the resources of the ACT and increases in size at a rapid rate.
There are very few people in the ACT whose wages or other income would be growing at a rate that is able to keep up with the government increases in taxation—very few people. The result for these people is that they are put under increasing pressure by a government that does not trust them to keep their own money. They are required each year to set aside more and more to fund the government and less and less to fund their own consumption and savings. You only have to talk to some of our seniors in the community and hear the level of apprehension and concern they have with the various rates and charges that are imposed, knowing that those people do not have an income growing at that rate and knowing that their only option is to dip into their capital savings or lower their standard of living—eat less and enjoy less of the society in which they have lived.
The government has chosen to spend with this budget, rather than allow people to spend their own money. In the 2008-09 financial year the government’s total expenditure is budgeted to increase by 5.8 per cent to a massive $3.324 billion. This represents an increase in expenditure of 44.9 per cent since the government came to power in late 2001, and this is an average increase of 5.44 per cent each year. This is again a large rate of increase that is faster than the growth of the ACT economy. The result is that the government is increasingly crowding out private enterprise and entrepreneurialism and replacing it with a larger and larger bureaucracy. Governments, as we have discussed here, and as I have pursued, best stay out of the world of business because they rarely ever get it right and they usually leave a trail of disasters.
I welcome some expenditure initiatives, however, that the government have introduced. Certainly, some of their work on mental health and the like has been for the benefit of the Canberra community. I acknowledge the Chief Minister’s passionate pursuit of that issue, no doubt coloured by his knowledge of individuals who have been inflicted with these matters. It is commendable that those areas are receiving attention, because I have come across cases in Canberra of families who are struggling to cope with one of their members who is clearly in need of greater support than they are able to provide.
However, not all of the expenditure has been on vital front-line services, and to suggest that it has been is somewhat misleading. The point is proven when one looks
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